James is absolutely right about this. Yesterday’s talk was yet more misaligning of the goals and aims of the Semantic Web, and complete ignorance of what Semantic Web developers are doing every day.

The transition to the Semantic Web was never going to be a quick one – just as the transition from the web of FONT tags to the web of CSS wasn’t a quick one, nor a painless one.

Pure marketing. It’s like standing up and saying “ovens are dead, we have microwaves!”.

Prediction: we are going to see a lot of companies and people stand up and say “hey look! The Semantic Web is dead and we have created the New Semantic Web and it’s So Much Better because you don’t have to worry about all that complex RDF stuff!” And they will all be wrong. You can’t just make complexity disappear in a puff of smoke.